Good morning everyone! Fed up by my feet problems and utter lack of exercise, I begged Mike to take me kayaking.

OH MY GOD MY ARMS AND CHEST MUSCLES ALMOST DID NOT SURVIVE THE TRIP. It was just an easy mile down to the bar and back, and several times I wondered if my upper body was going to give out before we got back. I took rather a lot of short breaks, letting Mike do more of the work. (well, the majority of the weight in our kayak was his, y’know? :) )

It was beautiful on the river:

We saw some big fat black vultures, hawks, herons, cranes and lots of other birds. We also almost crashed into a fallen tree because I was busy looking at a turtle.

And we saw not a single alligator, hooray! (I did have Siguette along for gator-protection)

My pecan chocolate ganache is cooling in the fridge waiting to be garnished with flaky sea salt, my strawberry rhubarb pie is in the oven, we have filet mignon in the meat drawer and the makings of caprese salad and bruschetta and I already marinated the chicken for tomorrow night’s chicken Makhani. But … what will I do to entertain them??

I was feeling rather ill at work last week and scurried back to my desk to get it under control. I carefully took some deep breaths and surreptitiously lowered my head as though digging for something in my purse. The feeling passed fairly quickly — last time I take vitamins on an empty stomach! — helped by the realization that if I keeled over I’d probably flash my thigh holster.

Even in my muzzy nauseated state it was somewhat of a comfort to me that my boss is a gunnie. If I ever DID get really sick, I know he could safely disarm me and stow Kevin while waiting for the EMTs.

Which begs the question of my post title.

This is Florida. While the vast majority of the population goes unarmed, there are still significant numbers of us who go about our daily business with the best self-defense hand-tool available.*

Do emergency medical personnel receive training in how to safely handle, make safe and stow firearms?

If not – why not?

(I’m hoping that TOTWTYTR will take the lead on this one, but anyone is welcome to chime in with their thoughts, medical professionals or not!)

*HAND-tool. The best tool period is still between your ears. Of course. :)

“They come to our shops,” one man told the London Daily Mail last week, “and we fight them with sticks.” When a gang invaded an upscale restaurant, threatening customers and demanding their valuables, the staff attacked them brandishing knives and drove them out.

Of course, the subtitle of the article — “In a civilized society, people would be allowed to defend themselves with guns, not baseball bats” — is both quite true and quite depressing. Still, we here at LookingForLissa celebrate those who defend themselves in spite of ridiculous limitations on the tools they can use to do so.

Because, you see, I bet Mike a dollar that “Tea Party Recession” was going to be the next big talking point.

Oh well. It’s sort of an open-ended bet, so I have some time to get the ABC or CBS talking heads to mention it. (We agreed that CNN anchors and anyone to the left of MSNBC doesn’t count, so David Axelrod gets me nothing.)

To my Florida readers: DO NOT GO TO BILL RAY NISSAN IN LONGWOOD, FLORIDA.

We were looking to replace Bernard (our old beloved Toyota Avalon, who thankfully is going to a good home and a loving family) and thus went Internet-browsing. (That is, Mike went Internet-browsing. He’s really good at this kind of stuff.). And a person from Bill Ray Nissan quoted us an AMAZING deal on a 2012 Altima. Amazing enough that we made an appointment to go in and see them and made sure to print out the email for proof.

Well, we get there, and right away we ask to go over the price and financing stuff; no point in browsing and test-driving if they’re trying to scam us. So the salesperson goes running off to check with the Financing Guy and he comes back with the terms of the deal.

Guess what? The price they quoted us didn’t include the options already installed on the car, so it immediately jacked up the price three grand!!! And then, when we pointed out how utterly dishonest this was, they tried the following two defenses:

1) The guy who wrote the email is “new” and shouldn’t have written it that way;
2) Yes, it’s kind of misleading to quote the price that way, but everyone else does it so we have to do it too or our prices don’t compare.

Got that? We didn’t mean to lie, it was a mistake, but also we have to lie because everyone else does.

It was perhaps the most brazen, shameless and unabashedly dishonest snow job we’ve encountered. I was cynically disgusted; Mike was personally insulted. They then made a last-ditch attempt at a deal, promising us “$Xx,yyy which includes taxes and options and everything.” We agreed to look at the numbers. Then it turns out that their quoted figure was based on paying the entire balance in cash that day, which we TOLD them was not the case.

We walked. Obviously.

Isn’t it illegal to quote the price of a vehicle without including the factory-installed options?